President Higgins pays tribute to Dublin-born Max Levitas as a ‘defender of democracy and its core values’

President Higgins has paid tribute to Dublin-born anti-fascist campaigner Max Levitas, who died on 02 November aged 103.

Max Levitas was born in Portobello, Dublin 8, in 1915 to parents who had fled the Baltic states and met in Dublin.

He was the last of the Dublin-born children to survive.

In the late 1920s, the family moved to Glasgow, and then several years later settled in London.

Max Levitas was a veteran of the ‘Battle of Cable Street’ in London, where anti-fascist groups prevented a rally of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists taking place in October 1936.

President Higgins said he heard the news of Mr Levitas’s death ‘with great sorrow’ and described him as an ‘anti-fascist and defender of democracy and its core values’.

“Proud of his Irish and his Jewish roots, Max Levitas was a citizen of the world, and a person of immense courage and great humanity.

A veteran of the ‘Battle of Cable Street’ in London, he was a remarkable representative of a family that has made an extraordinary contribution to social justice and to national and international politics.”

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